Plaut and her co-authors, Hazel Rose Markus, Jodi Treadway, and Alyssa Fu, published their findings in the paper “The Cultural Construction of Self and Well-Being: A Tale of Two Cities” (the hat tip for the Mark Twain quote goes to them). They focused in their research on San Francisco and Boston, two cities steeped in quite different popular narratives about the stodgy and history-oriented East and new and shiny West.
“These differences are often thought of as stereotypes,” Plaut says. “And what we are finding is that these stereotypes actually reflect something much deeper, and that local context shapes us in dramatic ways.”
I am exploring north along streets mechanized from below. Gears, pulleys, and cables live under the street, humming and clapping, droning and singing, partaking in the communion of automata.
San Francisco
Cupcakes and gangs, violence and sugar, “are perceived to exist in separate worlds.” And yet, as the Mission Local blog reports, a recent homicide, followed swiftly by a lunchtime gunfight, “offered Mission District residents a reminder that the hip neighbourhood where they feast on everything from the latest doughnut recipe to cupcakes and artisan pork rinds is also a place where gang violence still exists, and where a 2007 gang injunction is still in place.”
Gangs and Cupcakes: Violence and Sugar Go Together - Nicola Twilley - Life - The Atlantic
The hippies of the Haight were hardly the first victims of San Francisco’s tourist industry … . The city pioneered American slumming back in the 19th century, when tour operators started offering package deals on nocturnal Chinatown visits.
Community Map Making Through Storytelling
Tendermaps is a project that attempts to better define the Tenderloin area of San Francisco through community map making.
The project’s creators asked people in the neighborhood to draw their understanding of it onto a paper map of the area in story-like ways, specifying three types of information: paths, loves, and community areas. Participants self-identified as either workers, residents, or visitors.
This information has been layered onto an online map that lets visitors select specific types information they want to view about the area, and from what kinds of people.
